4 possible freak election outcomes

Could the 2012 campaign end in a tie? Is it possible for Mitt Romney to end up as president — with Joe Biden as his vice president? Could the presidential election end up decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, again?

The short answer is: probably not. To call those outcomes improbable would be a huge understatement. The strong likelihood is that one candidate will win both the Electoral College and the popular vote on Nov. 6 and bring our long 2012 slog to an end.

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But hey, it’s the end of October in a presidential election year — a hurricane is improbably threatening the Eastern seaboard — so it’s the time when a politico’s mind turns to the wild and crazy outcomes that could upend all expectations. And public polls still show a close enough race between Romney and Barack Obama that speculation is inevitable.

Here’s POLITICO’s guide to the freak outcomes that could send us reeling on election night:

A popular vote-Electoral College split

Of all the quirky results, this one is probably the most plausible. There’s a pretty straightforward set of events that leads to the popular vote and the Electoral College breaking in different directions — almost certainly to the benefit of President Barack Obama.

According to the best guesswork of strategists and pollsters on both sides, the scenario unfolds like this: Romney runs up huge vote margins in the South, Obama wins big blue states like New York and California by reduced margins, the swing states all end up very close, but Obama holds on to Ohio, Wisconsin and Nevada and blocks Romney from winning 270 electoral votes. In that scenario, Romney could take the popular vote by running up the score in heavily Republican states, while Obama amasses the electoral votes he needs for victory by eking out swing-state wins.

For Democrats, there might be a certain karmic justice in that result — payback for the 2000 election that saw Al Gore go down to defeat in the Electoral College despite winning the popular vote.

Public Policy Polling’s Tom Jensen laid out the math like so: “Romney wins the popular vote with an 8-point swing from 2008. But an 8-point swing from 2008 would still leave Obama as the winner in key swing states like Colorado, Wisconsin, Nevada, New Hampshire and Iowa.”